 I'm going to read, generally I've been doing a lot of longer prose, I'm going to read some shorter poetry prose pieces, and I've been really working with hybrid essays, so I'm going to read an essay as well. This is for Baruch, but who had to leave, so he asked for this one. It's called Men Have Loved Me. Men have loved me fanatic like sports fan, like beer guzzling, like gruff stubble on soft skin like callus palm on back of neck. Desperate like darkness in dance floors, drunk on shame, on hurt, conflicted like soft song and mosh pit, like behind closed doors, never ending like circles and ciphers, angry like fisticuffs and fuck you cop, like runaway shop lifting, like heart on sleeve, like don't touch me, like punk, like hunger, like father hug, rough and forgiving, permanent like old tattoos, bleeding in the skin, tender like old man hands full of stories and afraid of nothing anymore. Thank you. And then this is an essay, we'll see how it goes. I do a lot about fathering and, you know, raising a son and being raised as a son, and the passing on of both a new kind of manhood and also the toxic kind of manhood and where we stand in between both of those. This is called On the Beauty of Urinals and Bodies. My first night at a writing residency in the Oregon mountains, I struggled to build a fire in my cottage and remember as young child camping with my father, build it like cabin, like teepee he commanded. I failed, pushed out of the way and relegated to bunching newspaper. There was a lesson in this. I learned it. Recently at the Eagle Bar in San Francisco, I pee into a trough filled with crushed ice. Oh, that smell. And a mirror lining the urinal and all those cocks. Flaccid and familiar and the eyes. Strangers, eyes hungrier than mouths, mouths more loving than hearts. At dinner, years ago, I remember still a friend stops talking. Mid-sentence, we sit across from each other, beer to beer, he looks a scant. He looks vulnerable, like he about to cry, like he weak. I look away. We avoid our eyes. If he were a child, I'd ask to hug him. If lover, I'd ask to hold him. But he's only my friend and male. So instead, I do nothing. Lately, I find myself writing to my son, now adult, man of 27. But how to ask about failure? How to bring up manhood? How to lay bare what we have internalized? Son, I write. Refuse to be man, like punch, like cop. Instead, perform man like daydream, like silly childhood game, exuberant and reckless, the way someday a lover will hold you and whisper, you are such a good, good boy. And I remember camping with my son alone, dusk on a lake, late July. We decide to eat watermelon for dinner. We discuss various ways to prepare this meal. We laugh together, wide mouthed and unashamed. He says he only wants the heart, not the white, rind, crispy and bland. I say pick it up, high into the air and drop it. A kid, lofting a melon above his head, is a glorious sight. With a scream, he lets it fall. Broken and freed, we gorge, faces covered in juice, our fists buried deep in the body of our desire. At the residency, in the communal room around the fire, roaring and hot, we discuss art making, resistance. We share our histories. One night, we consider words like faggot and queer. We unpack the term cisgendered. One person claims that they refuse to use the word. You never know how comfortable someone is in their body. Another says it's not about comfort. It's about the privilege of never being uncomfortable. The fire burns to embers. How do we learn to mistrust ourselves? I think of shit talking. I think of high fiving. I think fist bumping and back slapping. I think my father's walk it off boy. I think playground taunts to suck it up pussy. I think of the words I've used that have harmed in places I've never had to feel unsafe. I think of privilege that flaunts itself as normalcy, like in bathrooms in San Francisco or at punk shows and during late night walks. And as my partner Cat called every single time, she jogs a Bernal Hill. I recall potty training my son. As young parents, I didn't realize you had to teach a child how to urinate in a toilet. Pee happens. Precision is learned. I instruct my son, hold it and aim. Years later, I remember that language and cringe. What have I taught? To build a fire is to welcome flame. To raise a child is to ask what they desire. To relearn gender is to discover what the body may have known all along. I consider the first time I explored another person's nakedness, to sniff armpit, to stroke body hair, to peek between buttocks, and then to reciprocate, to offer myself to their desire, trust them with the secret places of myself. Bodies are beautifully simple. Even in their difference, they are familiar, a place to call home. I write to my son, and also though now, I write to myself. I write to declaim, to resuscitate, to make myself more human, maybe less gendered, maybe more, and to imagine a new way of being. So son, I write, trust me, stay child, and I will leave all this manhood behind and find you. Thank you. And then I do love doing zines, and so I love doing these projects where I do one piece a day for 30 days. And with barely any editing, which sounds scary that I'm going to read some barely edited stuff to you, but no, I'm going to. This is my latest one, and I did it over with through September, and so I'll read a couple of these, and then I'll end. Here's another one about fathers. And this one, I kind of feel like the theme was a lot about intimacy. Then I'll read a couple less serious ones, more playful ones. This is called a whole body. My father called me over, bent down eye to eye, he stared at me. I tried to escape. I knew the tricks he played. Later, I'd come to know these as attempts to love. He held me close in the yard. I found you something in his palm, a vibrant green chameleon in the process of changing to earthy brown. The color of my dad's skin, I think later. He said, grab the tail. I did. My father let it go. I felt the lizard swing sway, then watched the body fall. The tail left wiggling in my fingers. I screamed, dropped it, put hand to mouth. My dad said like, fact, you killed it, boy. He picked up the tail, still thrashing, still acting as if it was complete, a whole body. He tried to give it to me and said, stop crying. The lizard's fine, but it's crazy what things will do to survive. Five. We speak of rooms. When we speak of rooms, we speak metaphor, potential, possibility, love or cum. There's room to play. There's room to fill, room to move. Of course, some rooms we fear. We name safe out of necessity, survival. Watch how you enter a room, my father said. And I learned some rooms you can never leave. You carry with you. But, lever, the room I imagine most often is captured in the phrase to make room. Such agency, such compassion, to carve out space from nothing, to construct a place from something as if everyone is welcome. Lever, I have made room for myself in closets and bathrooms and back alleys. I have offered my body as refuge, enter and find desire. I have crafted home, found sanctuary in rooms of my own design, but lover, no space is really safe. So come, nestle here for a time. We can call this room ours. And I'll read one more. Okay, it's called TBH. The depressing thing I realize, standing in the shower, hot steam, and the disturbing smell of gas leaking from copper pipes, getting ready to meet a date, is that I come closer to who I really am, who are who I really want to be in my cheeky responses to okay, cupid prospects. In real life as it is, I'm a hot mess. I contradict myself and not in the sexy Walt Whitman kind of ways. I agree to things I shouldn't agree to, then lie, betray someone and tell them myself I'm doing it because I practice the art of obfuscation to avoid explaining how I feel. I choose to placate rather than protest. So when rabbit hole 510 with pictures of him biking down market and posted up at some street action slash party asked me what I seek. And if I could describe myself as an NGO, I wrote what I seek is less about a thing or an act and more about a feeling, a situation, a chance to explore myself and my connection to others in safety with someone I can trust and who cares and will check in with me after. Easy, right? Oh, and an NGO, big brother, big sister. I sent a smiley face emoji. He wrote back, dude, sounds like you want a husband or wife. I just want to get laid. And the ejaculating water drops emoji. What could I say? I wrote TBH. I want the same thing. Shit, emoji. Thank you.